I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 on Friday night. First of all, I’d like to say that I am happy that Michael Moore was able to enter popular culture, it’s good for an alternate viewpoint to make headlines. So I can respect him that much. And I liked Bowling for Columbine, even if I don’t entirely agree.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is the type of film that makes me re-think the meaning of “The Truth.” It was clear that he used A LOT of propaganda tactics (hurt children, long scenes of weeping/upset people, extensive stereotyping), which led me to wonder who this was directed at. As a fairly political and historical saavy person I picked these tactics out right away, and although I won’t say I was unaffected by them (some of those war pictures are heartbreaking), I knew exactly what he was doing. I also believe that he probably needed to do much of this, to get his message across he needed to show people upset, he needed to show horrible war footage of children being hurt. It made the film really impact the people watching it, makes them remember it, makes them really see what war does.

I don’t believe all the stereotyping was necessary however. You figure that this film was intended for “regular” people, right? So, they showed this montage of clips with the Bush’s shaking hands with various arab men wearing their traditional arab dress. In this montage, Moore made no attempt to identify these people, it was just a whole bunch of “Bush shakes hands with dark skinned men in middle eastern costumes, look how evil Bush is.” I couldn’t identify them, so how can other people? Oh I see, we’re saying that any dark skinned man in a kaffiyeh is automatically a bad guy who the Bushes shouldn’t be associated with. Isn’t that the sort of message that Moore shouldn’t be proliferating?

Then there was the list of countries who supported us in the invasion of Iraq. The message was that they were small, insignificant countries that didn’t have a military, and Moore chose to take stereotypical footage from each one and use it to describe them. COME ON NOW! Why not show cowboys killing indians for our military then? Oh right, this is propaganda. I think he would have been much more effective to show the real truth about these countries, rather than old stereotype footage. Old stereotype footage makes me feel like I’m being lied to and manipulated.

As for the “truth” of the whole thing, I don’t know. I’m not horribly shocked by any of what he presented. Money and power are ALWAYS somehow linked. What did we expect when we elected a big US oil guy for president? That he wouldn’t have business and personal ties to other big oil families in the world? I think some of what he presented was coincidence as well. Just because a company some of the top US officials are involved with stand to make a lot of money from a catastrophe doesn’t mean they were involved (this was never said, but for some reason I felt it was implied). And it seems Moore made the corporations look evil (by listing a few) simply because they stood to and intended to profit from the terrorism. What do you expect? They are huge wealthy companies, we live in a capitalist society, do we think they will be charitiable? To a point, sure, but there is a bottom line to look out for. I don’t blame them for holding conferences, the services they provide are needed, why not come together to talk about it? I guess that’s easy to spin into “Corporations get together to make money off Mr. Johnson’s death on 9/11!”

I gave up on The Truth. I won’t try to pull apart pieces of what Moore said. Just like any angle of this situation, Moore has spinned it to produce a result. He has his sources, Bush has his sources, the NBC has their sources, Al-Jazeera has their sources. How can I tell who is telling the truth? There are problems with all their methods of reporting. Everyone has an agenda and a starting place in their mind for how to report something. Even if I had the money and resources there is no way for me, or anyone, to know the whole Truth of the world today.

So while I continue to watch NBC w
orld news (which is pretty childish, but the best 6:30pm US pop media news) and BBC world news, and read various news articles from around the globe, I realize that The Truth is simply what I choose to piece together in my head. Different, often opposing, viewpoints that I must think about and sort out to form a picture of what seems to me to be the most plausible explaination. At least I can sleep at night knowing that my opinions are educated and I’m not some sheep who follows what I read/watch on my favorite program or from my favorite pop culture figure.

Did I like the film? Not really. But I do think it has it’s place, and I’m mostly happy that it was released.

We went up to the Poconos Saturday afternoon, just stayed the night really, but it was nice. Michael’s mother got to give him his birthday gifts (his actual birthday is on Tuesday) and she fed us yummie food. We watched “Secret Window” which they had rented. Was pretty boring and predictable, the idea of the film has been done MUCH better in other films. I suppose I can’t really say more without spoiling it. It passed the time though, I think the worst part is that a neighbor was over watching it with us, and she’s the type who loves to talk through movies “Oh my gosh, is he dead? do you think he’s dead, he’s probably dead, I bet he’s dead.” I wanted to slap her and tell her to shut up.

Yesterday we moved our bedroom furniture into the bedroom we painted recently, now we’re getting ready to paint the other one. I started to spackle last night. We did some grocery shopping and had subs for dinner while we watched Clerks. That movie never gets old.

Today… not so sure what I’ll do Michael has the day off. Maybe some reading. Maybe take a nice long walk around some of the trails if the weather decides to hold.

*wanders off*

I love having a cat. Caligula has been sleeping on my lap for half the afternoon and it’s so cute. And nice to have a little soft critter to snuggle. Pets rock.

Tomorrow morning we’re going up to the poconos to do some hiking and relaxing. We’ll be coming back on Sunday because we don’t want to leave the animals alone for too long. We had planned on having a LAN party instead, but just so many people had other plans. I guess I should have expected that.

I finally saw Bubba Ho-Tep last night, because so many people said it was so great. It was funny, Bruce Campbell rocks, and who wouldn’t want to see a movie where Elvis and JFK take on a mummy? I’ll be watching Fahrenheit 9/11 tonight.

So Bitlbee. I haven’t been this excited about a piece of software in a while. I am going to keep using it. Apparently what people told me about signing up with AIM is not true, “Leia 26” is exactly like “Leia26” and it’s just a formatting option, even if you sign up with “Leia 26″. In Bitlbee I just add whatever name it is without the spaces.

I still get errors like:

16:09 -@root- serv_got_update() for unknown TOC handle Leia26:
16:09 -@root- loggedin = 1, type = 16

sometimes. It’s quite random, sometimes I’ll get a screen full of them when I log on, and sometimes I won’t get any. Doesn’t seem to influence the abilities of the client though, since these people still join the channel, and I can still chat with them. So this is a bug I can live with, for all I know it’s just AOL’s servers being screwy anyway.

I was so happy with all these improvements that I set up my own server:

USE=”msn, oscar, yahoo” emerge bitlbee

Done. Have I mentioned lately that I love Gentoo?

It’s just an internal server, running on my box behind the firewall, but I’m definately more comfortable using this than a public server.

This is so great %) Today I spoke with a cousin I hadn’t talked to in months because I wasn’t on AIM for so long. Woo!

In the past I only used the irssi away function when I went on extended vacations, so I really knew nothing about it. But now with IM I really need to be able to set away when I leave the desk. So I discovered this afternoon that you can set away on just one server! In one of the channel windows of the server you want to go away on just:

/away -one away reason

Yay for irssi.

*wanders off*

First of all, we finally got e-volutionaudio.com up on the web. This is pretty exciting, it’s a project that Steve, Evan and I have been working on for a couple months. It’s going to be a radio show website, our team will be writing radio “screenplays” and then having our group of professional voice actors (who actually do commercials and stuff!) preform the stories for us. And of course all sorts of fun sound effects and everything. I’ve always been interested in this sort of radio show, used to have tapes of “old time shows” of horror, and drama, and mystery when I lived at home. Writing for one is fun too, I will get to see my story come alive!

What we need now are more writers. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Drama. Any stories that would adapt well into a 20-60 minute audio play. We need people who can write stories, and people who can adapt stories into screenplay, and people who’d be happy just writing original stories AS screenplays. So spread the word! It’s a good way for both e-volution audio and the writers to be promoted.

I was sitting in a LUG channel on freenode this morning and I gave a gmail invite to one of the guys there. Email conversation got into what mail clients we used, that got into one guy mentioning that he used MS Outlook (hey you’re in a LUG channel buddy!), then us being like “omgz h8 @ M$” and then mentioning Instant Messangers. I used to use AIM and Yahoo! all the time, but somewhere along the way I started disliking them. I completely stopped using Yahoo! And over the past year or so I stopped using AIM for the most part. It just got to be annoying and distracting. I think it’s partly a psychological thing, I have conditioned myself to ignore IRC when I have stuff to do, but I can’t do that with IMs. IMs interrupt what I’m doing, and then if I take a while to respond people get all annoyed with me. So I just keep it off, problem solved.

Well one of the guys in the channel suggested I try bitlbee. It’s pretty cool, there are public servers which interact with the instant messaging services for you so you can have IM in IRC (they say AOL, ICQ, Yahoo!, Jabber and MSN work). I tried it out with AIM today. I was very very impressed at first, getting all excited about it because it really is just like another IRC server, the directions were very helpful and good, I really didn’t have any problems once I stripped HTML from the messages.

Then this afternoon I ran into some trouble. From what people tell me, AOL allows users to sign up with a space in their name (what were they thinking?). Well bitlbee doesn’t like this much, and gives me all sorts of errors. I’ll need to dig into this a bit more and see if there are fixes, because otherwise this really isn’t going to work out. Sigh… I was so excited too.

Or maybe I could just ignore people who decide to sign up with stupid spaces in their names!

I worked on my garden a bit today. Turns out that I’m really bad at moving plants %\ But I was able to clean up a bunch of weeds and move a few plants.

This afternoon I decided to go for a walk. I walked into town and brought a couple dollars worth of rolled pennies that had been sitting in my desk for over a year and took them to the bank. Then I took this free Propel Fitness Water coupon I got in the mail to the store to redeem it. Let me tell you a story about Propel. It sucks. Take everything good about flavored water, and everything good about real water, remove it, and give you a nasty sugary water tasting bottle of nastiness. I don’t know what they are thinking. I guess because I’m such a fan of real water that I can’t understand why people would want “special water with sucrose syrup.” It wasn’t refreshing at all after my walk, I dumped most of it out and got a glass of real water.

That’s it for now *wanders off*

I spent a better part of the morning cleaning the bathroom walls. As I might have talked about in a previous post there was a bit of mold growing near the ceiling in the bathroom since we moved in that has been a serious pain to clean. It’s semi-gloss paint, and in the past I’ve tried Windex, Clorox Bleach Cleaner, Scrubbing Bubbles, a mix of a little household chlorine bleach and a little water, dishsoap and hot water. It was getting quite frustrating, since nothing was really working. So today I was determined to tackle the problem again. I decided I’d try some of the concentrated orange cleaner that we use to clean the tile floors, and that actually didn’t do a bad job for getting the newer dark spots up, I spent a little over an hour with this and once I had gone over each area at least twice I got off my chair and looked around. It was definately cleaner, but you could still tell there was mold up there.

So, frustrated, I came upstairs to have a bit of a talk with Dr. Google. I went through all sorts of message boards that suggested all the things I had already done. I knew there was some sort of mold remover you can use, but apparently it’s not for painted surfaces. Then I came across a post that suggested a mix of at least half household chlorine bleach, half water. This was a MUCH stronger bleach concentration than I had used in the past, and definately stronger than they generally recommend you using. But I was really at the end of my options for getting rid of this mold that NEEDED to be removed. I decided to give it a shot.

I got out some nice plastic gloves and grabbed a sponge and some very bleachy water. To my delight and surprise it did the trick! So I spent about 45 minutes scrubbing all sorts of areas around the bathroom that needed it. Afterwards the whole bathroom stunk of bleach (well, still does) and so did I, and I took a long shower. I’m very happy with it all. Now we can consider going about repainting it, with mold resistant paint!

This afternoon I ate some lunch and sat down to do some more research about summer flowers, and weeds. I mentioned my search in IRC, and the woman I know who is a botanist has this week off, so she had some time to spend helping me out with my garden! I went outside and took a bunch of photos, then let her look through them so I could find out what was weeds and what was real plants. Turns out that everything I “wasn’t sure if it is a weed or not” is a weed. Tons and tons of weeds in my garden! So I think tomorrow I’ll go outside and pull lots of weeds. We had a nice long talk and she suggested a whole bunch of flowers that I can put in various parts of my garden, how exciting! Lots of purple and blues and whites that I think I’d really like, all perennials. She also suggested leaving a couple plots open for annuals that I might enjoy. I also got to ask her all sorts of questions about caring for plants after their flowers fall off (apparently daffodil’s can have their dead flowers removed when they die, but they need the green parts to continue to absorb sun energy to make it through the winter), and told me that tulip bulbs usually only last about 5 years, I had no clue! She also recommended that I pick up (or borrow from a library) the Pictorial Guide to Perennials by M. Jane Coleman Helmer and Karla S. Decker Hodge. I think I just might %)

Now to go make dinner. *wanders off*

It was a pretty typical Sunday. I did some work in my veggie garden and it seems the only things that are growing are the cucumbers and green beans, and they are growing all over the place, hee. Still no veggies yet, but I still need to wait a couple weeks. I hopped online a few times to figure out exactly what everything was (“oh good cucumbers DO have yellow flowers!”). I still didn’t have a ton of luck identifying everything, so I cleaned out everything I knew was weeds, and left some of the other stuff, I’ll see how it all grows and I’ll be much more prepared for next year.

I actually did significant work on Munch’s webpage. It’s really just a small page, but I kept changing the layout because I wasn’t happy, then needed to look for content and take some photos. I will share when I’m done and it’s set up on it’s nice little subdomain. While I was looking around for random Oscar information I came across a website about them that a woman in the Philly area made, and she had a couple stories about going into Wal-Mart stores and being horrified by how they kept their fish. I don’t really recall the fish department there so I started doing some searches and it seems that Wal-Mart has this horrible horrible reputation for caring for their live animals! Now I dislike Wal-Mart anyway, for several reasons, but neglecting animals is just not cool. So Wal-Mart now is officially on the “stores I hate” list.

I wasn’t really on IRC much today until this evening, just because I was doing all sorts of research online (and I get distracted by things that interest me on website often and end up looking at supernovas when I plan on searching for green beans). But one of the server owners on Xelium left me a message asking if I was interested in becoming an oper again. They told me that they had considered adding all of us from R2Q5 back, but figured that Michael was too busy (which is true) and our other two opers never were too involved in the first place (madragoran has work and his own server to oper on, and somewhat surprisingly Peacimowen is just too busy). So I figured I’ll probably accept. Being a normal oper is definately less work than being a server owner, no worrying about configs, no need to help write up regexs to ban certain scripts, and best of all, no worrying about having to deal with ddos attacks, that’s the owner’s job!

I finished The Secret of Life today, great book, perfect ending. And finally finished The Metaphysical Club (and loaned it to Vehicle00) the other day. I’ll definately have to read it again after I do a bit more research into the people involved with 19th century philosophy. I was able to keep up with the civil war ideas, and the science ideas, but philosphy, gosh I hardly knew anything about Holmes and Dewey, or Pierce or James. I’m sure I would enjoy the book much more if I had bit more background, it was just too much information too quickly for me to swallow, even though it took me over a month to read the book (nearly all of which was wading through 19th century philosophy).

I’m going to go get sleepy now. *wanders off*

When we first got Munch he had a rough couple of weeks. During these weeks he didn’t eat too much and I started to get worried. I did some searches online to find out the cause, and all I could find relating to them eating was to be careful not to overfeed them, because they love to beg. Well this certainly wasn’t my Oscar! I even put off the development of a little website for him because I was worried he wouldn’t make it.

Well I have some good news, he seems to be doing fine now! I fed him a bit in the middle of the day yesterday because he looked hungry, and today every time I walk past the tank he’s begging, just like a regular little Oscar! Yay Munch!

Caligula is doing much better too. He seems to have completely recovered from his surgery, his cold has cleared up, and from the way he’s been eating I’m quite sure that his teeth aren’t bothering him much anymore. He’s back to his old self again, even if he still is a bit annoyed with me because I have to give him liquid antibiotics until they are completely gone, and he hates that. He helped with laundry yesterday, tried to attack me to get some of my lunch this afternoon, and is sleeping on my lap right now so I don’t think he holds too much of a grudge anymore.

I’m glad this week is over. Going to make spaghetti for dinner now *wanders off*

*Takes a deep breath* Yesterday was quite a day. Everything I have to say is important, so I’ll just take it chronologically.

I was going through email on Tuesday, and rediscovered an email sent to me about 3 weeks ago with instructions on how to install UT GOTY Edition in Redhat and Slackware. That made me decide to update my Installing Unreal Tournament GOTY Edition In Linux How-To. I put his stuff on an additional page, and that inspired me to look into installing it in gentoo. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was very simple to do in Gentoo, the installer is in emerge, the umodpacks are in emerge! All you need to do is unmask a couple UT packages, emerge, and follow the simple directions (put in cd, mount drive, etc). But just for consistancy I wrote up some directions and put them up on the site. I love Gentoo!

Unfortunately I was in a terrible mood most of the day yesterday. Not really depressed just… feeling upset. It was a lot of things that got to me, and I’m sure recieving the big bill from my emergency room visit didn’t help any. It’s great how the medical community rapes people who lack medical insurance.

By the time Michael got home I had managed to improve my mood a bit. I read for a bit, and a little after 7 we ordered a couple pizzas and waited for , (Vehicle00), and (Kati) to show up. They arrived around 7:30. The plan was for Michael to install Gentoo on Vehicle’s box. Kati brought some knitting because the guys thought it would be great for us to knit together (or something?). I must admit that some of my bad mood all day was due to this, I am really a beginner at knitting and I was afraid that Kati was some master knitter, and I am often crazy-shy around people I don’t know. I ended up deciding that I’d just tell her right off that I was lousy at knitting and hadn’t done it in 6 months. To my surprise this was the perfect approach, apparently she’s something of a beginner too! She was worried about the same thing I was. We really didn’t have trouble talking (except maybe I laughed too much, damn nervous habits!). She’s a really great person, I was happy with how nicely we got along. I spent a lot of time talking with Vehicle too, he’s cool in real life %) escapenguin was definately the person I saw the least, since he was mostly hanging out with Michael (“Probably telling geeky shell jokes,” Vehicle speculated). But everyone enjoyed playing with Caligula, who is doing much better, and I was thrilled to see him running around and jumping again.

Time, pleia2, Vehicle00, escapenguin, Kati

The evening was long, more work on Vehicle’s system needed to be done than Michael previously thought, so it was around midnight when we were all saying “oh crap it’s late” and decided that they’d head home and Michael would drop off the computer sometime later this week when it was finished.

Sometime during the night Xelium got attacked. Not too sure exactly how it happened, but we decided to shut down R2Q5. To be honest I’m a bit relieved, there are too many risks with running an IRC server these days, and I have so many other projects to work on, I don’t need to be worrying about a silly server. Being an all-powerful IRCop really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Besides, it’s great to have r2q5 back home with us, if Time doesn’t have other plans for it I might be able to use it as a fun testing box! What does bother me (and seriously pisses me off) is that people attack
IRC servers in the first place. It’s really fucking lame.

R2Q5 is home now.

And just in case you’re worried, #13thHour is fine, it’s still on the Xelium network. Rather than connecting directly to r2q5.xelium.net (or irc.clockbot.net or clockbot.xelium.net) you will have to connect via either: fire.xelium.net or odin.xelium.net We’ll have irc.xelium.net working properly again once the DNS pool is updated to reflect the servers still on the network.

*wanders off*

Well I was hardly online at all this weekend. Michael had a bunch of work to do on both Saturday and Sunday and we had a bunch of errands to run. Saturday morning I gave the vet a call because Caligula had a bit of a cough. We figured it was from the medication at first, but I was quite worried because watching a kitty cough is so sad %( The vet asked us to bring him in that afternoon, so at 2pm we were in the vet’s office. We were also a bit concerned because it seemed like he actually had physical difficulty keeping food in his mouth to chew it. So the vet took a look at him, and it seems he must have caught a cold from one of the animals when he went in for surgery earlier in the week. She also discovered that he’s teething! Poor guy, what a week! He’s on some antibiotics for the cough and it seems to be clearing up.

After taking him to the vet, we decided to go out to the mall because Michael and I needed some clothes. A bunch of stores were having big sales, so we picked up a few things we didn’t plan on, and Michael got me a copy of Brother Bear, yay! I ended up getting a bit of a headache from standing near the cologne in Strawbridges for too long. We decided to drop by CompUSA to look at wireless NICs for my laptop. We figure we can wait around until spoofee has a wireless router for a reasonable price. So until then my laptop is still offline, which makes it rather useless since I can’t move files to and from it. We figured we’d look for a wired NIC while we were there… and it seems they didn’t have any. CrapUSA. My head was bothering me a bit more, so we hopped over to Barnes & Noble to get a couple White Chocolate Mochas, mmm. I picked up a copy of Friday to replace the copy of ‘s that Caligula ate. Then went into Michael’s work for about half an hour so Michael could do some physical work on some boxes. It wasn’t until after 9 that we left and headed home, on the drive home my headache came back pretty badly, when we finally got home I took some advil and crawled in bed. Michael made us some Boca Pizzas, and by the time they were ready my headache had subsided a bit and we sat down and started to watch Brother Bear, then Dr Who.

Yesterday was pretty slow, I got about halfway through The Secret Of Life by Paul McAuley which is turning out to be a great book, nice mix of science and science fiction (it’s written by a biologist). I’ll definately have to read more of his stuff in the future. I also picked up The Metaphyscial Club again, the first two (of five) parts were really great and a breezed through them, getting into the civil war, and science in the 1900s, but these last 3 parts are pretty deep with philosophy and sociology that I know very little about, so it’s a lot to take in. Still interesting though.

We did some grocery shopping then came home and had some baked potatoes for dinner. Then sat down and watched Brother Bear with Tuke and Rutt’s commentary (the moose, voiced by Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis respectively), it was pretty funny %) And watched lots of bonus features, yay!

Today has been a nice day, I think I’ll go for a walk. *wanders off*

Apparently I’m quite stubborn when it comes to important change on my desktop. It took me months to switch to Gentoo after Michael said it kicked ass. It’s taken me a little while to try out the xfce4 window manager, despite Michael raving about how cool it is. I think I just don’t want to waste my time with disappointment if things don’t work the way I want them to. My buddy b2s from #13thHour said that he recommended it a couple months back.

Well they were absolutely right, it kicks ass. I haven’t fallen in love with a window manager this quickly since Enlightenment. I’ve always used enlightenment on my primary workstation, maybe it’s time for a change.

Oh, and it has a cute mouse mascot.

I still have some xfce4 customizing to do, but here’s a screenshot of how much I’ve played so far:

http://www.princessleia.com/images/MyImages/screen/xfce4-2.jpg

Now to work on keybindings…

And a quick note, if you want to try this out make sure you’re going with xfce4. I accidentally installed the regular xfce package in gentoo earlier and it was a pretty horrible window manager…